Chapter 4

NICK AND THE SPARROW HILLS

‘_Write how here on that spot (the Sparrow Hills) the story of our lives, yours and mine, developed._’—A Letter, 1833.

Three years before the time of my cousin’s visit we were walking on the banks of the Moskva at Luzhniki, _i.e._ on the other side of the Sparrow Hills. At the river’s edge we met a French tutor of our acquaintance dressed in nothing but his shirt; he was panic-stricken and was shouting, ‘He is drowning, he is drowning!’ But before our friend had time to take off his shirt or put on his trousers, an Ural Cossack ran down from the Sparrow Hills, dashed into the water, vanished, and a minute later reappeared with a frail-looking man, whose head and arms were flopping about like clothes hung out in the wind. He laid him on the bank, saying, ‘We had better roll him or else he will die.’

The people standing round collected fifty roubles and offered it to the Cossack. The latter without affectation said very simple-heartedly: ‘It’s a sin to take money for such a thing, and it was no trouble either; come to think of it, he is no more weight than a cat. But we are poor people, though,’ he added. ‘Ask, we don’t; but, there, if people give, why not take; we are humbly thankful.’ Then tying up the money in a handkerchief he went to graze his horses on the hill. My father asked his name and wrote about the incident next day to Essen. Essen promoted him to be a non-commissioned officer. A few months later the Cossack came to see us and with him a pock-marked bald German, smelling of scent and wearing a curled fair wig; he came to thank us on behalf of the Cossack, it was the drowned man. From that time he took to coming to see us.

Karl Ivanovitch Sonnenberg, that was his name, was at that time completing the German part of the education of two young rascals; from them he went to a landowner of Simbirsk, and from him to a distant relative of my father’s. The boy, the care of whose health and German accent had been entrusted to him and whom Sonnenberg called Nick, attracted me. There was something kind, gentle, and dreamy about him; he was not at all like the other boys it had been my luck to meet, but, nevertheless, we became close friends. He was silent and dreamy; I was playful but afraid to tease him.

About the time when my cousin went back to Kortcheva, Nick’s grandmother died; his mother he had lost in early childhood. There was a great upset in the house, and Sonnenberg who really had nothing to do was very busy too, and imagined that he was run off his legs; he brought Nick in the morning and asked that he might remain with us for the rest of the day. Nick was sad and frightened; I suppose he had been fond of his grandmother. He so poetically recalled her in after years:

“When even’s golden beams are blent With rosy vistas, radiant hued, I call to mind how in our home The ancient customs we pursued. On every Sunday’s eve there came Our grey and stately priest arrayed, And, bowing to the holy shrine, With his assistants knelt and prayed. Our grandmamma, the honoured dame, Would lean upon her spacious chair And, fingering her rosary, Would bend her head in whispered prayer. And through the doorway we could see The house-servants’ familiar faces, As praying for a ripe old age They knelt in their accustomed places. Meantime, upon the window-panes The evening glow would shine, reflected, While incense floated through the hall By censers, swinging wide, projected. Amid the silence so profound No sound was heard except the praying Of mingled voices. On my heart Some feeling undefined was weighing, A wistful sadness, dim and vague, Of fleeting, childish dreams begot. Unknown to me my heart was full Of yearning for I knew not what.”— OGARYOV: Humorous Verse.[47]

... After we had been sitting still a little I suggested reading Schiller. I was surprised at the similarity of our tastes; he knew far more by heart than I did and knew precisely the passages I liked best; we closed the book and, so to speak, began sounding our mutual sympathies.

From Möros who went with a dagger in his sleeve ‘to free the city from the tyrant,’ from Wilhelm Tell who waited for Vogt on the narrow path to Küsznacht, the transition to Nicholas and the Fourteenth of December was easy. These thoughts and these comparisons were not new to Nick; he, too, knew Pushkin’s and Ryleyev’s[48] unpublished poems. The contrast between him and the empty-headed boys I had occasionally met was striking.

Not long before, walking to the Pryesnensky Ponds, full of my Bouchot terrorism, I had explained to a companion of my own age the justice of the execution of Louis XVI. ‘Quite so,’ observed the youthful Prince O., ‘but you know he was God’s anointed!’ I looked at him with compassion, ceased to care for him and never asked to go and see him again.

There were no such barriers with Nick, his heart beat as mine did. He, too, had broken loose from the grim conservative shore, and we had but to shove off more vigorously together and almost from the first day we resolved to work in the interests of the Tsarevitch Constantine!

Before that day we had had few long conversations. Karl Ivanovitch pestered us like an autumn fly and spoilt every conversation with his presence; he interfered in everything without understanding, made observations, straightened Nick’s shirt collar, was in a hurry to get home, in fact, was detestable. A month later we could not pass two days without seeing each other or writing letters; with all the impulsiveness of my nature I devoted myself more and more to Nick, while he had a quiet and deep love for me.

From the very beginning our friendship took a serious tone. I do not remember that mischievous pranks ever took a foremost place with us, particularly when we were alone. Of course we did not sit still, our boyish years showed themselves in laughing and playing the fool, teasing Sonnenberg and playing with bows and arrows in the yard; but at the bottom of it all there was something very different from idle companionship. Besides our being of the same age, besides our ‘chemical affinity,’ we were united by our common faith. Nothing in the world so purifies and ennobles early youth, nothing keeps it so safe as a keenly alert interest of a purely human character. We respected our future in ourselves, we looked at each other as ‘chosen vessels,’ predestined.

Nick and I often walked out into the country. We had our favourite places, the Sparrow Hills, the fields beyond the Dragomilovsky Gate. He would come with Sonnenberg to fetch me at six or seven in the morning, and if I were asleep would throw sand and little pebbles at my window. I would wake up smiling and hasten to go out to him.

The indefatigable Karl Ivanovitch had instituted these walks.

In the old-fashioned patriarchal education of Ogaryov Sonnenberg plays the part of Biron.[49] When he made his appearance the influence of the old peasant who had looked after the boy was put aside; the discontented oligarchy of the servants’ hall were forced against the grain to silence, knowing that there was no overcoming the damned German who fed at the master’s table. Sonnenberg made violent changes in the old order of things. The old man who had been nurse positively grew tearful when he learned that the wretched German had taken the young master _himself_ to buy ready-made boots at a shop! Sonnenberg’s revolution, like Peter the Great’s, was distinguished by a military character even in the most peaceful matters. It does not follow from that that Karl Ivanovitch’s thin little shoulders had ever been adorned with epaulettes. But nature has so made the German, that if he does not reach the slovenliness and _sans-gêne_ of a philologist or a theologian, he is inevitably of a military mind, even though he be a civilian. By virtue of this peculiarity Karl Ivanovitch liked tight-fitting clothes, buttoned up and cut with a waist, by virtue of it he was a strict observer of his own rules, and if he proposed to get up at six o’clock in the morning, he would get Nick up at one minute before six, and in no case later than one minute after six, and would go out into the open air with him.

The Sparrow Hills, at the foot of which Karl Ivanovitch had been so nearly drowned, soon became our ‘Holy Mountain.’

One day after dinner my father proposed to drive out into the country. Ogaryov was with us and my father invited him and Sonnenberg to go too. These expeditions were not a joking matter. Before reaching the town-gate we had to drive for an hour or more in a four-seated carriage, built by ‘Joachim,’ which had not saved it from becoming disgracefully shabby in its fifteen years of tranquil service and being heavier than a siege cannon. The four horses of different sizes and colours who had grown fat and lazy in idleness were covered with sweat and foam within a quarter of an hour; the coachman Avdey was forbidden to let them get into this condition, and so had no choice but to let them walk. The windows were usually closed, however hot it might be; and with all this, we had the indifferently oppressive supervision of my father and the restlessly fussy and irritating supervision of Karl Ivanovitch. But we gladly put up with everything for the sake of being together.

At Luzhniki we crossed the river Moskva in a boat at the very spot where the Cossack had pulled Karl Ivanovitch out of the water. My father walked, as always, bent and morose; beside him Karl Ivanovitch tripped along, entertaining him with gossip and scandal. We went on in front of them, and getting far ahead ran up to the Sparrow Hills at the spot where the first stone of Vitberg’s temple was laid.

Flushed and breathless, we stood there mopping our faces. The sun was setting, the cupolas glittered, the city lay stretched further than the eye could reach; a fresh breeze blew on our faces, we stood leaning against each other and, suddenly embracing, vowed in sight of all Moscow to sacrifice our lives to the struggle we had chosen.

This scene may strike others as very affected and very theatrical, and yet twenty-six years afterwards I am moved to tears recalling it; there was a sacred sincerity in it, and that our whole life has proved. But apparently a like destiny awaits all vows made on that spot; Alexander was sincere, too, when he laid the first stone of that temple, which, as Joseph II.[50] said (though then mistakenly) when laying the first stone in some town in Novorossia, was destined to be the last.

We did not know all the strength of the foe with whom we were entering into battle, but we took up the fight. That strength broke much in us, but it did not crush us, and we did not surrender to it in spite of all its blows. The wounds received from it were honourable. Jacob’s strained thigh was the sign that he had wrestled in the night with a God.

From that day the Sparrow Hills became a place of worship for us and once or twice a year we went there, and always by ourselves. There, five years later, Ogaryov asked me timidly and shyly whether I believed in his poetic talent, and wrote to me afterwards (1833) from his country house: ‘I have come away and feel sad, sad, as I have never been before. And it’s all the Sparrow Hills. For a long time I hid my enthusiasm in myself; shyness or something else, I don’t myself know what, prevented me from uttering it, but on the Sparrow Hills that enthusiasm was not weighed down by solitude. You shared it with me and those were moments that I shall never forget, like memories of past happiness they have haunted me on my journey, while all around I saw nothing but forest; it was all so dark blue and in my soul was darkness, darkness.

‘Write,’ he concluded, ‘how on that spot (that is, on the Sparrow Hills) the history of our lives, yours and mine, developed.’

Five more years passed. I was far from the Sparrow Hills, but near me their Prometheus, A. L. Vitberg, stood, austere and gloomy. In 1842 returning finally to Moscow, again I visited the Sparrow Hills, once more we stood on the site of the foundation stone and gazed at the same view, two together, but the other was not Nick.

From 1827 we were not parted. In every memory of that time, general and particular, he with his boyish features and his love for me was everywhere in the foreground. Early could be seen in him that sign of grace, which is vouchsafed to few, whether for woe or for bliss I know not, but certainly for being apart from the crowd. A large portrait of Ogaryov as he was at that time (1827–8), painted in oils, remained for many years afterwards in his father’s house. In later days I often stood before it and gazed at him. He was painted with a turned-down shirt collar; the painter had wonderfully reproduced the luxuriant chestnut hair, the youthfully soft beauty of his irregular features and his rather swarthy colouring; there was a dreaminess in the portrait that gave promise of intense thought, a vague melancholy and extreme gentleness shone in his big grey eyes that suggested the future greatness of a mighty spirit; such indeed he grew to be. This portrait, presented to me, was taken by a woman who was a stranger; perhaps these lines will meet her eyes and she will send it to me.

I do not know why the memories of first love are given such precedence over the memories of youthful friendship. The fragrance of first love lies in the fact that it forgets the difference of sex, that it is passionate friendship. On the other hand, friendship between the young has all the ardour of love and all its character, the same delicate fear of touching on its feelings with a word, the same mistrust of self and boundless devotion, the same agony at separation, and the same jealous desire for exclusive affection.

I had long loved Nick and loved him passionately, but did not venture to call him my friend, and when he was spending the summer at Kuntsovo I wrote to him at the end of a letter: ‘Whether your friend or not, I don’t know yet.’ He first used the second person singular in writing to me and used to call me his Agathon after Karamzin,[51] while I called him my Raphael after Schiller.[52]

You may smile if you like, but let it be a mild, good-natured smile, as men smile when they think of being fifteen. Or would it not be better to muse over the question, ‘Was I like that when I was developing?’ and to bless your fate if you have had youth (merely being young is not enough for it), to bless it doubly if you had a friend then.

The language of that period seems affected and bookish to us now, we have become unaccustomed to its vague enthusiasm, its confused fervour that passes suddenly into yearning tenderness or childish laughter. It would be as absurd in a man of thirty as the celebrated _Bettina will schlafen_,[53] but in its proper time this language of youth, this _jargon de la puberté_, this change of the psychological voice is very sincere, even the bookish tone is natural to the age of theoretical knowledge and practical ignorance.

Schiller remained our favourite.[54] The characters of his dramas were for us living persons; we analysed them, loved and hated them, not as poetic creations but as living men. Moreover we saw ourselves in them. I wrote to Nick, somewhat troubled by his being too fond of Fiesco, that behind every Fiesco stands his Verrina. My ideal was Karl Moor, but I soon changed it in favour of the Marquis of Posa. I imagined in a hundred variations how I would speak to Nicholas, and how afterwards he would send me to the mines or the scaffold. It is a strange thing that almost all our day-dreams ended in Siberia or the scaffold and hardly ever in triumph; can this be characteristic of the Russian imagination, or is it the effect of Petersburg with its five gallows and its penal servitude reflected on the young generation?

And so, Ogaryov, hand in hand we moved forward into life! Fearlessly and proudly we advanced, lavishly we responded to every appeal and sincerely we gave ourselves up to every enthusiasm. The path we chose was a thorny one, we have never left it for one moment, wounded and broken we have gone forward and no one has turned us aside. I have reached ... not the goal but the spot where the road goes downhill, and involuntarily I seek thy hand that we may go down together, that I may press it and say smiling mournfully, ‘So this is all!’

Meanwhile in the dull leisure to which the events of life have condemned me, finding in myself neither strength nor freshness for new labours, I am writing down our memories. Much of that which united us so closely has taken shape in these pages. I present them to thee. For thee they have a double value, the value of tombstones on which we meet familiar names.[55]

... And is it not strange to think that had Sonnenberg known how to swim, or had he been drowned then in the Moskva, had he been pulled out not by a Cossack of the Urals but by some soldier of the Apsheronsky infantry, I should not have met Nick or should have met him later, differently, not in that room in our old house, where, smoking cigars on the sly, we entered so deeply into each other’s lives and drew strength from each other. He did not forget our ‘old house.’

‘Old Home! My old friend! I have found thee, Thy cold desolation I see; The past is arising before me, And sadly I gaze upon thee. Unswept and untended the courtyard, Neglected and fallen the well, Green leaves that once whispered and murmured Lie yellow and dead where they fell. The house is dismantled and empty, The plaster is spread on the grass, The heavy grey clouds wander sadly And weep for thy plight as they pass. I entered. The rooms were familiar: ’Twas here—when we children were young— The peevish old man sat and grumbled, We feared his malevolent tongue. And this room, my friend, oh! my comrade! We shared, one in heart and in mind, What bright golden thoughts were conceived here In days that lie dimly behind! A star shimmered faint through the window: The words that are left on the wall Were written when youth was triumphant, Inspirer, dictator of all! In this little room love and friendship Were fostered. What joys did they bring! But now, in its drear empty corners The spiders’ webs broaden and cling. And suddenly, smitten with terror, Methought in the graveyard near by I stood and I called on my loved ones, The dead did not answer my cry....’ OGARYOV: Humorous Verse.[56]